Every piece of video evidence in a criminal case carries weight. Body camera footage, surveillance recordings, dashcam video — these files can mean the difference between conviction and acquittal. Storing this evidence on your primary workstation, a shared network drive, or — worst of all — a cloud service introduces risks that no defense attorney should accept.
Your laptop gets stolen from a courthouse parking lot. Your firm's server gets breached. A cloud provider receives a subpoena for your client's data. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They happen. And when they happen, attorney-client privilege can be compromised in ways that are difficult or impossible to remedy.
The solution is deceptively simple: a dedicated, encrypted external SSD that holds nothing but case evidence. You plug it in when you work. You disconnect it when you're done. You lock it in a safe when it's not in use. The attack surface drops to near zero.
The PRO-G40 is our recommended evidence vault drive for several reasons:
If your Mac has Thunderbolt ports (all Apple Silicon Macs do), always use the Thunderbolt connection. The speed difference is significant when running FrameCounsel analysis:
| Connection | Read Speed | Write Speed | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thunderbolt 3 | 3,000 MB/s | 2,500 MB/s | Full forensic analysis, batch processing |
| USB 3.2 Gen 2 | 1,050 MB/s | 1,000 MB/s | Portable review, secondary machines |
For multi-video sync sessions where FrameCounsel needs to read from several large files simultaneously, Thunderbolt's bandwidth headroom eliminates stuttering entirely.
Connect the PRO-G40 to your Mac. Open Disk Utility, select the drive, and click Erase. Choose:
APFS Encrypted means the drive requires a password every time it's mounted. Choose a strong passphrase and store it in your firm's password manager (never on a sticky note, never in a text file on your main drive).
By formatting as APFS Encrypted, you get hardware-accelerated AES-256 encryption on Apple Silicon. Every byte written to the drive is encrypted at rest. If the drive is lost or stolen, the data is unreadable without your passphrase.
Inside the mounted drive, create a consistent structure:
/EvidenceVault/
/Cases/
/2026-Smith-CR/
/Raw-Evidence/
/FrameCounsel-Projects/
/Exports/
/2026-Johnson-CR/
...
FrameCounsel can be configured to default its project save location to the Evidence Vault, so new analyses are always written to the external drive rather than your internal storage.
In FrameCounsel, go to Settings > Storage > Default Project Location and point it to your Evidence Vault's Cases directory. Every new project will be created there automatically.
The evidence vault workflow is simple and repeatable:
This physical air gap is your strongest security layer. When the drive is disconnected and locked away, no remote attacker, no malware, and no unauthorized user can access your evidence.
A single drive is a single point of failure. Purchase two identical PRO-G40 drives. Use one as your primary working drive and the second as a backup stored in a different physical location — your home safe, a bank safe deposit box, or a secondary office.
Sync the backup weekly using a direct drive-to-drive copy (connect both drives, use rsync or a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner). The backup drive should also be APFS Encrypted with a separate passphrase.
Never use cloud backup for evidence drives. iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive — none of these are acceptable for criminal defense evidence. The moment your evidence touches a third-party server, you lose control of who can access it, and you create a record that the evidence existed on that service. Keep everything local, keep everything encrypted, keep everything physical.
The SanDisk Professional PRO-G40, combined with APFS encryption and a disciplined connect-work-disconnect workflow, gives defense attorneys an evidence storage system that is fast, portable, secure, and fully under their control. No cloud. No network. No exposure. Just your evidence, encrypted and locked away until you need it.
Learn more about FrameCounsel's air-gapped operation or get started with a free trial.
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On-device body camera analysis, contradiction detection, and court-ready reports. No credit card required.